I DON’T BELIEVE I can work today. I find myself angry with God again and pummeled by the riptides within me. Over the death of a dog. This happens when someone I love dies. Like my two younger brothers a couple years ago. And Juneau, the beautiful Siberian Husky my son rescued. And Mosby, the Black Labrador Retriever puppy, which I videotaped my son picking from a litter more than a dozen years…

WORDS WE DIDN'T KNOW WE HAD IN US. What do we say to someone when we know this could be the last time we'll be with this person?

This could have been about final moments between a son and his mother. For Mom is fragile now, and 800 miles from Kansas, across the eastern plains to Ohio. Or it could have been about death. For I’m the only male left in Mom’s and Dad’s family. Dad and my three younger brothers are gone. It could certainly have been about processing grief. For I’ve grieved most of my life. First for Dad who…

Some Christians read Jonah's story as fiction, like a parable. And they see lessons about God in there. Others read the story as history and add the lessons that God does miracles and bulls can wear clothes.

I JUST FINISHED MAPPING Jonah’s story for the new paraphrase of Jonah in the Casual English Bible. It’s an interesting story that many Christians read as history, especially since Jonah shows up elsewhere in the Bible. But some Christians and Christian scholars as well say they read the story as fiction, but with a real person playing an imaginary role. They say they see in the story many…

THERE’S POETRY IN THE BIBLE FOR THE UNITED STATES  and for other democracies threatened by wannabe kings, autocrats, and souls soaked in hatred.

THERE’S A BIBLE SONG FOR THE NATION, and for other democracies threatened by wannabe kings, autocrats, and souls soaked in hatred. The poem, which reads like song lyrics, comes from a prophet most Christians, I suspect, never knew existed: Habakkuk. His country was threatened, like ours, but from outsiders. He lived in the Jewish nation of Judah, in what is now southern Israel. The threat came…

Obadiah is the shortest book in the Bible because it doesn’t take long to warn people that God is going to exterminate their nation—kill it so dead that it never comes back.

Obadiah is the shortest book in the Bible because it doesn’t take long to warn people that God is going to exterminate their nation—kill it so dead that it never comes back. It takes only one chapter, about as long as Abraham Lincoln’s famously short Gettysburg Address. I just finished paraphrasing it for the Casual English Bible, and creating some new maps to help people visualize the nation of…

I've paraphrased the New Testament, half the Old Testament, and created almost 600 Bible maps. About 400 maps and 400,000 words to go. Just around the corner.

THE TITLE IS THE STORY. I’m deep into my paraphrase of the Bible. The New Testament is written. This morning I did the math for my agent. He wanted to know how far I had gotten into the marathon mission of paraphrasing, mapping, and footnoting the entire Casual English Bible, from Genesis and the beginning of time to Revelation and the rest of forever. Those numbers surprised me. I didn’t realize…

I just created 50 Bible maps for Isaiah, to accompany the new Casual English Bible paraphrase of the book.

YESTERDAY I FINISHED CREATING 50 BIBLE MAPS FOR ISAIAH. And I wrapped up my first pass at the paraphrase of Isaiah. All 66 chapters. Some beautiful. Some disgusting. I don’t mean to seem disrespectful toward the prophet or the Bible, but how else to describe the book’s last verse: The LORD says, “People will go to the trash heap To look at corpses of those who rebelled. Forever, the worms will…

Isaiah seemed to see Jesus 700 years before Jesus was born. Isaiah 53 almost sounds like its written by an eyewitness to the Crucifixion. Here's a new version of the prophecy, paraphrase especially for Bible newcomers.

JESUS SHOWS UP 700 years before his birth, in a dramatic prophecy from the Book of Isaiah: Isaiah 53. At least that’s what most Christian scholars seem to say. They say Jesus is the mysterious Servant of God who suffers and dies for the sins of others. Jewish scholars read it differently. Where Christians see Jesus, Jews often see the suffering nation of Israel…especially in Isaiah’s day, when…